Last Words
by Rhea1305
Summary: The thoughts of a young woman on the events in AGoT, focusing on the last words her mother said to her.


**A/N: I wrote this after an exam on the way home. If there are any errors it's most likely a typing error i haven't picked up on. Unfortunately, i have a shattered shoulder and can only type with my left, (which has its problems as i'm a righty). I know it deviates from the story line but it was just an interesting POV character that i created. As for the title that is the unfortunate consequence of not quite knowing what to name it. Anyways tell me what you think.  
>Rhea<strong>

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Apart from the POV character.**

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><p>I did not understand it then. Not as a child. I just thought that the illness that had wreaked havoc upon my mother had finally reached her brain and left her mumbling random utterings.<p>

She'd had the fever for weeks and it had coursed through her body, leaving her weak and, to my despair, dying. It was a week before my fifth name day, the last time I saw her. She was in her rooms, laying, pale, clammy and limp. I can remember seeing the sweat upon her brow and the mass of dark, tangled hair, so much like my own. Her eyes were rimmed with a red rings, purple underneath. Her skin held a pale yellowish hue. She was dying and no one could deny it. Not even me.

I sat with her the whole day, until my nurse came and told me to get to bed. As I stood, whispering a quiet goodbye, telling her I loved her, she grabbed my arm. Staring, almost wildly into my eyes she whispered those words: that troubled me then and have troubled me from that day to this.

I never saw her alone after that.

A man came and took her away. He never saw me, but I did him. Tall and square, with dark hair like mine and my mothers, I never saw his face. Not clearly, but my mother knew him. She called him "_Ned_" and whispered "_promise me_" over and over again.

My nurse would not let me go to her. She held me back and pulled me to the servant quarters until the men, under the banner of a wolf, left. They left me all alone, taking my mother with them.

I've never forgiven that man, for taking my dying mother away from me. I should have been there. I should have. He had no right, no matter what house he was from; he had no right to tear us apart.

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><p>A few years later, we moved from our remote residence in the North West, to the city of King's Landing. I hated it. It was too warm and there were too many people moving around. However, as I grew up I managed to learn that the people could cover my presence.<p>

I could climb. I could climb walls like a spider, finding finger holes and small ledges in the stonework. I was older and there was very little my nurse could do anymore. She tried to get me to wear dresses and sew. She failed. I wore trousers, a large hood and a sword.

Small and curved, it had belonged to my mother and was the only thing she'd ever left to me. There was a wolf crudely engraved onto the hilt, along with the word "Stark". The name stuck.

The guards always watched the doors. They never checked the ledges, windows and walls. That was how I saw the King for the first time.

A fat man with black, scraggly hair, he was sat in the throne room, on a huge iron chair, lording it over the world. I didn't think much of him upon my first glance, but on closer inspection I realised there was something…something familiar about the man. Something I saw in myself, every time I looked into the glass to tie my hair. My seventeenth name day had been and gone before I realised that I may have stumbled upon something…

He died, the king, he died less than half a year later. A hunting accident, apparently he'd been skewered by a boar. There was something about this story which turned my stomach. Something that didn't feel right, it just didn't fit.

That was how I found myself there. I found myself back in the Throne room, when Prince Joffrey Baratheon, took the throne as King of the Seven Kingdoms. I found myself sitting in a window as he announced that Lord Eddard Stark was a traitor.

All I could do was stare at the man who tore my life apart. I knew it was him, just from the way he walked. The way he stood, tall with the familiar dark colouring that is so reminiscent of my mother, it almost hurt to think on how much they looked alike.

I saw his face, I knew, I knew, the same way I knew when I saw the King.

She'd called him "Ned".

There was nothing I could do when they executed him. I was up too high, sat on the edge of a roof, legs dangling into open air, watching the events unfold. There was nothing I could do except watch everything. It was as if time had slowed down. Then in that moment, I finally understood what she meant, even if I didn't understand why she'd said it.

All I could hear were the last words my mother had said to me, twelve years earlier: _"Only a fool cheers when the new Prince rises."_


End file.
